Apparently The Washington Post is trying to make itself look reasonable with actual journalism because it lost $77 million last year?

 I mean, they predicted a $100 million loss, so it wasn't THAT bad, right?

Jeff Bezos paid $250 million for WaPo in 2013.

But I don't think $77 million really matters to Jeff Bezos.

Sum ting else wong.

 

Catherine Rampell at WaPo, who is no friend of the right: It’s hard to exaggerate how bad Kamala Harris’s price-gouging proposal is, a bunch of communist, economic gibberish

  

 It’s hard to exaggerate how bad this policy is.

It is, in all but name, a sweeping set of government-enforced price controls across every industry, not only food.

Supply and demand would no longer determine prices or profit levels.

Far-off Washington bureaucrats would.

The FTC would be able to tell, say, a Kroger in Ohio the acceptable price it can charge for milk.

At best, this would lead to shortages, black markets and hoarding, among other distortions seen previous times countries tried to limit price growth by fiat. (There’s a reason narrower “price gouging” laws that exist in some U.S. states are rarely invoked.)

At worst, it might accidentally raise prices. ...

If your opponent claims you’re a “communist,” maybe don’t start with an economic agenda that can (accurately) be labeled as federal price controls. We already have plenty of economic gibberish . . ..     

-- WaPo 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/08/15/kamala-harris-price-gouging-groceries/     

 

Harris is 0-2. 

She picked a terrible VP who is as far to the left as she is.

Now her first policy announcement is a throwback to the 5-year plans of the USSR.

Extremely inauspicious.

This is perfect

 

https://obeygiant.com/kamala-harris-forward/

Like Democrats generally Kamala Harris wants to ban assault weapons, even though they can't define them, ignoring that most weapons crimes are committed with handguns

Meanwhile, conservatives want children to read age-appropriate books.

There are no banned books in America, unless you are a commie librarian, but I repeat myself, who won't stock conservative books demanded by the public.

Like guns, we have to go buy our own.

 

Commie Broadcasting System wants you to know Kamala Harris herself never gave any money to bail out 2020 rioters, looters, and arsonists, even though she promoted giving donations for just that purpose

 

https://tcbmag.com/riots-destroy-30m-affordable-housing-project/

The French election commentary on right wing twitter has been as laughably apocalyptic as left wing

 Meanwhile, here are the final election results from France's most-watched news channel BFM-TV, slanted pro-business instead of pro-worker, shown below.

As you can see Le Pen's "right wing" alliance RN has overwhelming support in terms of votes with 10.12 million in the 2024 Second Round (left column) vs. 3.58 million in 2022, and now enjoys 143 seats vs. 89 in 2022. It's now arguably France's biggest party.

RN has grown its support phenomenally in just two years.

Its problem is that its support is more diffuse, so that its supporters are frequently outnumbered by enough voters from other parties to win seats. And this time leftist NFP and Macron's centrist ENS  cooperated in the second round to reduce candidates so that voters had to choose more often than normally between just two sides.

In the end no one got even close to 289 seats to achieve control in the 577 seat National Assembly.

And Macron could easily lose a vote of confidence in the wake of this within weeks and send the voters back to the polls again.

RN is obviously a growing threat to the status quo all while Macron has been just bleeding out seats since 2017, when he had a comfortable lead with 350.

Even CNN recognizes this:

The RN’s success should not be underestimated. In the 2017 elections, when Macron swept to power, the RN won just eight seats. In 2022, it surged to 89 seats. In Sunday’s vote, it won 125 – making it the largest individual party. That unity means it will likely remain a potent force in the next parliament, while the solidity of the leftist coalition remains untested. 

Stay tuned. The fireworks are not over, not in the least because the lunatics of NFP are even more divided than France as a whole, primarily because of the presence of the anti-semitic communist Jean-Luc Mélenchon. 

Marine Le Pen won 39 seats of 577 outright in the first round on Sunday

 Thirty-nine National Rally candidates have already been elected to parliament after winning over 50 percent of first-round votes -- a tour de force by a movement that never before managed to win a parliamentary seat in the first round of voting of a two-stage election before.

They include the party's longtime leader Marine Le Pen and party vice-president Sebastien Chenu. ...

Among the losers was Communist Party leader, Fabien Roussel, who lost his seat to an RN candidate in a constituency that had been held by the Communists for over 60 years. ...

The party's [NR's] worst scores were in Paris, where all its candidates were eliminated in the first round.

More.

Chicoms commit act of war against Philippines in Spratly Islands' Second Thomas Shoal, Biden sits idly by despite actual treaty of 1951 pledging mutual defense

 ‘Only pirates do this’: Philippines accuses China of using bladed weapons in major South China Sea escalation 

"They are Philippine Navy vessels, and according to international law, they enjoy what we term as sovereign immunity,” Koh said. “That is very dangerous, because, if anything, that could even be construed as an act of war.”

Instead of bailing out a bunch of deadbeat ingrates' student loans for votes in November maybe demagogue Joe Biden should have built some ships to help us fulfill our promises to our freedom-loving friends around the world.

This guy can't imagine that "civilization" was just fine in 1956, when there were only 2.8 billion people in the world instead of 8 billion

 Kevin Dolan: If Birth Rates Continue To Plummet, Civilization Will End

 

 Birth rates inevitably decline for the economic reasons with which Mr. Dolan says he's primarily concerned. But he himself doesn't seem to reckon with the fact that the spread of prosperity has produced population growth to the point of its current natural limit. Years ago already it was predicted that global population would peak around 9 billion before falling. It falls because that's what prosperity does. Prosperity dulls the natural response to want, which is reproduction.

 

Meanwhile Mao killed his millions by the tens from 1949 and America killed its millions by the tens from 1973 and few have been the wiser.

Oddly, we still call this civilization.

 

Be that as it may, failure to reproduce eventually will necessitate a gradual and huge redistribution of wealth from the older population to the younger population, involving sometimes quite dramatic repricing of goods and services in the process because of the law of supply and demand.

 

And then at some point the natural response to reproduce will reassert itself "after the money's gone".

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Once in a lifetime.

 

It doesn't get any funnier than failing local newspapers seeking a federal bailout

The last gasp of a defunct business model which no longer appeals to consumers. If people kept more parakeets and ate more fresh fish these papers would sell better.

Oh yeah, these commies also want "collective bargaining".

And I want a pony.

Now Congress Must Defend Democracy at Home by Saving Press

Bill Gertz: US speeds up development of new, lighter W93 warhead for US Navy's new Columbia class boomers to help counter Chicoms' new ICBM fields

 The story is here.

Brutal video shows citizen after citizen blasting Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson to his face over illegal aliens displacing and terrorizing inner city minorities

Definitely worth a watch, here.

The guy at the end likens one party Democrat rule in Chicago to the one party communist state of China.

Impressive!

USA overwhelms China for most millionaires and billionaires, but 13,500 wealthy Chicoms fled China in 2023

The U.S. is the top country for millionaires and billionaires :

The U.S. has rapidly overwhelmed China as the world’s top spot for millionaires and billionaires, according a new report.  

There are now more than 5.5 million Americans with liquid investible assets of more than $1 million, up 62% over the past decade and well above the global growth rate of 38%, according to the 2024 USA Wealth Report from Henley & Partners and New World Wealth.

Over the past five years, the population of millionaires in the U.S. has grown 35%, nearly twice as fast as China’s. The U.S. is now home to 37% of the world’s millionaires, up from 35% in 2018.

The divergence grows even more at the top of the wealth ladder. The U.S. has 9,850 centi-millionaires — those worth $100 million or more — compared with China’s 2,352. The U.S. has about 788 billionaires to China’s 305.

“The USA remains the world’s undisputed leader in private wealth creation and accumulation,” according to the report.

Dominic Volek, group head of private clients at Henley, said the strict Covid lockdowns in China coupled with increases in its government intervention in the private sector have slowed the growth in wealth creation.

“China has certainly slowed a lot due to these elements and the U.S. has benefited,” he said.

The shift from China to the U.S. is also reflected in wealth migration patterns. A net 13,500 Chinese millionaires left China in 2023, marking a new record. The U.S. had a net inflow of 2,200 millionaires in 2023 and a projected inflow of 3,500 in 2024, according to the Henley report.

Shithole Chicago commie mayor Brandon Johnson drives out the wealthy and property prices down

 From Bloomberg here:

The historic Gold Coast, featuring 100-year-old mansions, opulent condos and designer boutiques, has lost some of its most illustrious residents and appeal in recent years as the city’s high taxes and crime encouraged the wealthy to relocate. Those staying in Chicago are opting for more modern homes in trendier areas, leaving Gold Coast properties sitting on the market for months.

Now a plan to boost taxes on the sale of homes of $1 million or more could further depress deals in the neighborhood, whose residents include the billionaire Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker. Known as the “mansion tax,” the measure will be on the ballot during the Illinois primary on Tuesday. ...

It’s unclear what impact the tax will have on property prices and whether it will generate the revenue that the mayor’s office expects. Los Angeles passed a similar measure increasing transfer taxes for properties over $5 million in 2022, but the measure only generated $142 million, a tiny fraction of the over $900 million it was expected to bring in. ...

The Gold Coast currently has 113 homes on the market at $1 million or more, according to Zillow. Only Streeterville, directly south of the Gold Coast and along the famous Michigan Avenue shopping strip, has more.

In the broader area of the Near North Side, which includes the Gold Coast and Streeterville, homes over $1 million have spent an average 123 days on the market, almost double the average in the rest of the city, according to Chicago Association of Realtors data collected from 2021 to 2023.

Steve Sailer on communist fellow traveler J. Robert Oppenheimer the movie: wut, lol, yikes, sheesh, um, holy cow, and yeah that's California

admirably (perhaps excessively) historically accurate

the welcome clarity of the sound

the porkpie hat with the wide Western brim 

the movie is overly critical of Oppenheimer 

a nuclear weapon hasn’t been used in anger since 1945 

Oppenheimer had a long track record of misjudging Stalin’s character . . . as head of the world’s most glamorous academic organization, the Institute for Advanced Studies, a job at which he was superb due to his polymathic near-infallibility of judgment

I try to hold glass-half-full opinions of scientists like Oppenheimer and Millikan and admire them for their historic accomplishments rather than cancel them for their mundane political opinions [even though] The Soviets tested their first fission bomb in 1949, largely due to having (at least) four spies at Los Alamos [thanks to J. Robert Oppenheimer's mundane political opinions]

Here.

Oppenheimer's deep involvement with the communist Haakon Chevalier began as early as 1937 at UC Berkeley

Allan H. Ryskind, here:

The FBI had opened a file on Oppenheimer as early as 1941, after he had failed to immediately inform superiors that three men in Berkeley, California, had been solicited to obtain nuclear secrets for the Soviet Union and that both he and his brother Frank had been urged to help them. One of his colleagues at the University of California at Berkeley was Haakon Chevalier, who worked with Oppenheimer on various Communist enterprises and who urged him to give Soviet Union Premier Josef Stalin what he wanted.

The Bureau opened its file on Oppenheimer after he had attended a December, 1940, meeting at Chevalier's home that was also attended by the Communist Party's California state secretary William Schneiderman and its treasurer Isaac Folkoff, each of whom was being wiretapped by the FBI.

In early 1943, Chevalier had a brief conversation with Oppenheimer in Chevalier's kitchen, with Chevalier mentioning that a scientist, George Eltenton, could transmit information of a technical nature to the Soviet Union about our progress on the highly secretive atomic bomb project that Oppenheimer was working on.

He initially rejected the overture to assist Eltenton but failed to report the incident until August of 1943. His failure to promptly report what was clearly a Soviet espionage effort would become central to the decision to revoke his security clearance. Oppenheimer did not report the recruitment effort until six months later. In subsequent interviews with Army security, he admitted he had been approached, but he refused to name Chevalier or anyone else who might have been involved. Not until December, 1943, in response to a direct order from Groves, did he name Chevalier.

From 1937 to 1942, he was a member at Berkeley of what he called "a discussion group," which was later identified by fellow members Chevalier and Gordon Griffiths as a "closed" or "secret" unit of the Communist Party for Berkeley faculty.

 

Why I won't be patronizing Oppenheimer by seeing it: He was a Stalinist and a traitor

 Daniel J. Flynn, here:

As described in this column previously, Pavel Sudoplatov, so high-ranking that the Soviets placed him in charge of murdering Leon Trotsky, maintained in his autobiography that “Oppenheimer supplied … the Soviet Union with crucial information for it to successfully test its own atomic bomb in 1949.” He details Oppenheimer’s role, “which included allowing moles access to secret data to copy it, and describes him as ‘knowingly part of the scheme.’”

Material from the files of both Soviet and U.S. intelligence supports Sudoplatov’s claim: “An Oct. 2, 1944, memo from the Soviet archives, signed in receipt by chief of secret police Lavrentiy Beria, identifies Oppenheimer as a ‘member of the apparatus of Comrade [Earl] Browder’ who ‘provided cooperation in access to research for several of our tested sources including a relative of [the Communist Party USA leader].’”

Venona project decrypts refer to Oppenheimer under a codename, monikers in most but not all circumstances reserved for Soviet assets. A decoded March 1945 intercept “instructs Soviet agents to ‘re-establish contact with “Veskel” … as soon as possible.’ Veskel, the National Security Administration determined conclusively, referred to Oppenheimer.”

In The Venona Secrets, late authors Herb Romerstein and Eric Breindel wrote: “In May [of 1945] the Rezidentura sent Moscow another report from [Theodore] Hall on atom bomb research. It revealed the locations of work being done and the names of the heads of each research group. All of the names were clearly written out except one, that of J. Robert Oppenheimer, who was listed as ‘Veskel,’ the head of Los Alamos.”

Oppenheimer’s critics lacked this information in 1954, so one better understands their restrained classification of him as merely a security risk rather than charging that he lacked, in the words of President Dwight Eisenhower’s Executive Order 10450, a “complete and unswerving loyalty to the United States.” What’s the excuse of the NBC News Studios documentary airing on MSNBC for omitting so much information from credible sources in the U.S. and U.S.S.R. intelligence apparatus painting a grim picture of Oppenheimer’s trustworthiness? ...

Oppenheimer donated large sums to Communist causes, subscribed to Communist publications, and married a Communist. Other associates in the party included his brother, sister-in-law, landlady, the girlfriend who later became his mistress, and numerous students. He attended secret meetings of Communist professors while teaching at Berkeley.

 Most damning of all, Haakon Chevalier, a friend and professor at Berkeley, approached Oppenheimer with the idea of passing on Manhattan Project secrets to the Soviet Union. Oppenheimer did not report this event to his superiors for many months and, when he did, described the events dishonestly, i.e., by omitting both himself and Chevalier from the story. Rather than steer clear of someone petitioning him to commit espionage, Oppenheimer continued to see Chevalier socially for years.

Iran's spy ship BEHSHAD still in Chicom naval base in Djibouti can't orchestrate Houthi attacks in the seas near Yemen

 

Since the US Airforce started bombing targets on Friday, Iran's recon vessel which was relaying info to the Houthis high-tailed it to the Chicom naval base in Djibouti to hide out

 

Christmas means it's time for someone to find more evidence of Chicom slave labor in a garment

 Reported here.